6 ideas
The Igbo word nkali means 'to be greater than another,' and stories are defined by it: how they are told, who tells them, when, and how many are told all depend on power. Power is the ability to tell another person's story and to make it the definitive one. Whoever controls the circulation of narratives about a group controls how that group is understood.
The simplest way to dispossess a people is to tell their story starting with 'secondly.' Begin with the Native Americans' arrows and not the arrival of the British, and the victims look like aggressors. Begin with the failure of the African state and not colonial creation of that state, and the effect looks like the cause. Where a narrative begins determines who is cast as responsible.
A stereotype's problem is not that it is untrue but that it is incomplete, making one story become the only story. Showing a people as one thing, over and over, turns them into that thing in the minds of observers. This robs people of dignity because it emphasizes how they differ rather than how they are similar.
Growing up middle-class in Nigeria, Adichie knew only that her family's houseboy Fide was poor, because her mother kept saying so and asking her to pity him. When she visited his village and saw an intricately patterned raffia basket his brother had made, she was startled that anyone in his family could actually make something. Poverty had been the only story she had of them, and pity had crowded out any sense that they could be skilled or creative.
Adichie, who objected to Americans seeing Africa as one catastrophe, visited Guadalajara and felt shame on realizing she had absorbed the US media image of Mexicans as abject immigrants. Seeing ordinary people laughing, smoking, and going to work showed her she was not immune. The single story is a default product of the stories that surround anyone, not a failing peculiar to other people, so it must be looked for in oneself.
As a young reader in Nigeria who read only British and American books, Adichie wrote stories full of white children with blue eyes who played in snow, ate apples, and talked about the weather, though none of that matched her life. Discovering African writers like Chinua Achebe showed her that people like her could exist in literature. When the only available stories exclude you, you learn that you cannot be their subject, and seeing yourself in literature widens what you think is possible.